As I'm exploring the fantastic world of indie game development lately, I end up watching a large number of video tutorials on the subject. Even though the quality of the content is pretty variable, I'm very grateful to the creators for it. That being said, I couldn't help noticing this particular bit times and times again: a = lerp(a, B, delta * RATE) Behind this apparent banal call hides a terrible curse, forever perpetrated by innocent souls on the Internet. In this article we will stud...

Me and my friends were huge fans of Google Allo , specifically its integration with the stock and cryptocurrency markets. Bringing live market data directly in our group chats majorly enhanced related conversations. Allo was very popular and loved by users so of course Google axed it, Rest in Peace . Once its end-of-life was announced my group chat began searching for a new home. So, in 2018 in my dorm room I started working on a Discord chat bot that could help bridge some of the gaps left by...

Hello! Welcome to Fearghall's Factorio Friday Facts! (FFFF, if you will.) Over the last few months, you have seen asteroids a few times as a background part of some other FFFs, but for all their understated majesty, they were actually quite a complicated trick to pull off! Come with me as I take you on a 3720 to 1 journey through this asteroid field. Asteroids do concern me We first started with placeholder asteroids that were just the same as any other sprite - a 2...

You might have heard of long-pole problems: when you are packing a tent, its bag needs to be at least as big as the longest pole. (This is my preferred etymology; there are others .) In garbage collection, the long pole is the longest chain of object references; there is no way you can algorithmically speed up pointer-chasing of (say) a long linked-list. As a GC author, some of your standard tools can mitigate the long-pole problem, and some don’t apply. Parallelism doesn’t help: a baby t...

0.0 Context Setting Friday, 17 May in Portland, Oregon, where the sky is mostly blue, the temperature is pleasant, and we don’t have to stay inside because of dangerously bad wildfire smoke. A good day! I am not going to the Code for America Summit, but I am going to be jealously guarding a table at the second floor bar in the Oakland Marriott at exactly the same time as the Code for America Summit is happening , on Thursday 30 May. Which is two weeks yesterday! What a coincidence! If...

One of the cool things modern tech has made straightforward is the ability for gadgets to balance themselves. Spinning reaction wheels allow a device to change its position and hold it in place, even if it’s balancing on a point. Last century, this would have been a major (and expensive!) engineering challenge. Today inexpensive nano-tech gyroscopes, direct-drive motors and microcontrollers have reduced automatic balancing to an engineering class project. I’d love to learn more about th...

I realized recently that I haven’t been writing much about the Hoot Scheme-to-WebAssembly compiler . Upon reflection, I have been too conscious of its limitations to give it verbal tribute, preferring to spend each marginal hour fixing bugs and filling in features rather than publicising progress. In the last month or so, though, Hoot has gotten to a point that pleases me. Not to the point where I would say “accept no substitutes” by any means, but good already for some things, and wort...

I want to read all the newsletters I subscribed to. I want to read everything in the ten web dev community slacks I joined. I want to read everything on the seven Discord servers I am on. I want to read every blog post in the hundreds of feeds I follow. I want to read every toot of the people I follow on Mastodon. I want to find more people to follow. I want to ensure I didn’t miss your cool and happy announcement. I want to attend your conference/meet-up virtually. I want to w...

Monday's OpenAI announcement of their new GPT-4o model included some intriguing new features: Creepily good improvements to the ability to both understand and produce voice (Sam Altman simply tweeted "her" ), and to be interrupted mid-sentence New image output capabilities that appear to leave existing models like DALL-E 3 in the dust - take a look at the examples , they seem to have solved consistent character representation AND reliable text output! They also made the new 4o mode...

The Post Millennial breach in this week's video is an interesting one, most notably because of the presence of the mailing lists. Now, as I've said in every piece of communication I've put out on this incident, the lists are what whoever defaced the site said TPM had and they certainly posted that data in the defacement message, but we're yet to hear a statement from the company itself. Taking it at face value, where does their responsibility lie as it relates to individuals in this data set? ...

In this post we'll build a database in 400 lines of code with basic support for five standard SQL transaction levels: Read Uncommitted, Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Snapshot Isolation and Serializable. We'll use multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) and optimistic concurrency control (OCC) to accomplish this. The goal isn't to be perfect but to explain the basics in a minimal way. You don't need to know what these terms mean in advance. I did not understand them before doing this projec...

Some things have been made nearly impossible to search for. Say, for example, the long-running partnership between Epson and Catalina: a query that will return pages upon pages of people trying to use Epson printers with an old version of MacOS. When you think of a point of sale printer, you probably think of something like the venerable Epson TM-T88. A direct thermal printer that heats small sections of specially coated paper, causing it to turn black. Thermal paper of this type is made in va...

Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood to be appreciated. You are the audience , and the magician. Love is an idea. A moment of love can be forgotten but it can never be destroyed. It will be inscribed in time forever. Like an idea, love can exist long after death. Love lives simply by bein...

The second pattern in Juntao Qiu's series on data fetching is on how to avoid the dreaded Request Waterfall. Parallel Data Fetching queries multiple sources in parallel, so that the latency of the overall fetch is largest of the queries rather than the sum of them. more… The second pattern in Juntao Qiu's series on data fetching is on how to avoid the dreaded Request Waterfall. Parallel Data Fetching queries multiple sources in parallel, so that t...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 269  | May 15, 2024 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...